I walked the long way up to my car. I cranked the motor and Fleece sat up in the well behind me.
“Guess what?” he said. Something precious was coming. “No, you guess what. I couldn’t help it. They came for me. I cut them down in flame, Peter first. Peter crawled over to the wall and wrote fuck on it in his own blood. It seemed to be an ultimatum.”
“Ass!.. but not bad, though. ‘An ultimatum.’ I was lying here telling myself, if Monroe gets back, we’ve got to steal the rest of his letters. Because I didn’t get him.”
“What?”
“I got no pictures of him. When I was running out of the hotel I was trying to take the roll out so no matter what happened, I’d have the pictures, but the spool got away from me and unrolled out on the sidewalk.”
“That wonderful camera, and you drop the film.”
“But at least we’ll get the rest of the letters. I don’t want to get close enough to him to take any more pictures … but we’ll figure out a day when he’s away from his house …”
I remembered that, in the hotel, I had avoided looking at Peter as often as I could. In fact, I’d held my hands to my face when he was there. It was too embarrassing a horror to see him directly, all beaten up, the face of the letters.
8 / Sliding
I was being faded out of music, “serious” music, I mean, and didn’t know it. The professors were running me out of the field. I bought a new coat made out of reptile leather over at a sale at Gus Mayer ($150, even so). And I wore it, it was full spring and getting warmer, but I wore it, thinking now I am ready. I didn’t know for what, quite, but I suspected there was evil weather ahead. Fleece attempted to ignore the coat for a week. I did wonder about the figure I was cutting, and asked him what he thought. He told me I looked like an endlessly mean queer, which he had been patiently waiting to say that week, I bet, knowing I was uncertain about the coat. However, there was a bleached-blond girl who played flute in the Jackson Symphony who was excited about the coat and declared to me, during the symphony recess, that I looked like an Indian prince. This was Patsy Boone, a freshman at Millsaps College, and she was nobody’s beauty — after the popping blue eyes and the nice teeth, just a piece of skirt, it seemed — but she had pleasant, stunning things to say about me. I took the solo of the “Habanera” once, in the absence of the first-chair trumpet. During the recess she found me and pressed my arm. She said she almost couldn’t stand it while I was playing. Something had happened to her, body and soul, which she couldn’t discuss just now.
So, at the next rehearsal, I was playing along at fourth part, swelling with new zest, and I got in trouble with the violist who sat in front of the trumpets. He was a professor of music at Belhaven College, a girls’ school in Jackson. He told his other violist friend that I sounded like a cow stepping in its own pies. I heard this, and told him I would get him for it. He had a loud voice and others had heard him. The jackass was six foot three and could’ve beaten me to a pulp just defending himself. But he called the police about my threat, and I got a call on the floor telephone in the dorm from the captain at the Jackson police station telling me this violist had bolted his doors and was trembling in his house with a shotgun.
He never showed up at rehearsals as long as I came. Manino, the conductor — a lean sissy who’d made a reputation down South on the violin — decided he needed the violist more than me and kicked me out with a quiet explanation about how, if the truth were known, I did every now and then sound like a Mexican calling the bulls. I packed up and told symphony work goodbye. I walked out of Murrah auditorium, heard the orchestra plunge into “Polovtsian Dances” without me, and with no lacking in the brass section; heard no dismay over my absence; everybody was bright on his notes, the percussion were ripping and jangling in my bones so I felt like a drunk gypsy, the French horns were husky and Slavic, and the strings carried the dances with that sadness strings still carry, no matter what gay dance they play.
I lay down in my T-bird. My eyes were wet, and I had to drag out the old handkerchief, looking out at those silvery streetlights on Highway 51, and over at the Ole Miss medical center, its new spring campus rising toward the lights, its big lazy trees, its rolled green. You felt that the moon in the blue was the old drawing master of it all. Goodbye Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Manfredini, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Borodin, I was thinking. Then I sat up and told all European music to go to hell.
I had jazz and miles of blues and an endless trek of rhythm in me. I got my shades out of the glove compartment and put them on, even in the night Then I went sailing away, in a thunder of leaking mufflers. Let the gas and the ass spill, no top on my car. The young May wind took all sweat and all tears off me, and Jackson was a deep greenery with intersections of orange and gray, by what showed through my shades.
I didn’t tell Livace about being kicked out of the symphony. He was my instructor and he’d gotten me the place. He used to be first chair with the symphony, but now he didn’t have the time. When he sent me over, he told me what I ought to do was listen for a couple of years. I asked him why I would need to carry my horn over with me. He said I should finger the notes and think the tones. I could actually play at forte markings and above. This was the way he had learned, with the Minneapolis Symphony, and when he’d begun actually playing, he never missed a note or was out of tune and moved swiftly up to first chair. Among the musicians of Minneapolis, it was known that he had never missed a note or tone. I thought of Livace as a statue of a man with a trumpet to his lips in some cold Minneapolis park.
At first I couldn’t figure why Livace didn’t have the time to play with the symphony any more. He was another Italian who dragged his darling fathomlessly intricate culture around with him, like a tail; he was Catholic, he had to drive to Jackson for mass, since there was no Catholic church near Hederman sever, and his weak old De Soto stalled out on him perpetually, but further than that, he was scared, and I knew it One day in his office, he was so scared that he spoke to me as if I was his last friend. To get his doctorate in music he had borrowed money from the Mafia. Now he had a family and could afford to pay back, at the most, only two-thirds of the monthly note they wanted; there was quite an interest on the loan. He knew he wasn’t sending his payments to people who sat around in offices writing letters to him about how much he was lacking. He expected that, at the least, one day he would come to this office and there would be an angry muscular creature laying for him. Livace kept one of those giant economy bottles of aspirin on his desk and ate from it — he always ran a fever, you could see it in his ears. He looked something like Sid Caesar, the comic, and like Sid, sweat and fever were his realm. One afternoon he wanted me to take his monthly payment to the post office; it was a heavy envelope, packed with green cash, I could tell. After I got back, he asked me if I knew what I’d done. I said I’d mailed a lot of money for him, is what I’d done.
“What you have just done is mail the money I needed to pay for a hernia operation on my baby son.”
Aside from this sort of thing, though. Livace could play the fanny off a trumpet. He’s the best straight virtuoso I’ve ever heard. When he taught, it was by a glib performance by the one and only Livace himself. Try to match me, he said. His eye would lie on the music like the dead eye of a fish, he would take in the music by that one eye, and out the end of the horn came a spray of notes not only correct, but sweet, spangling. I’d be in the practice cell across from him, blasting away at a passage, and hear steps coming my way. He’d have his own horn, a Bach Stradivarius, and give me the courtesy of a chuckle, then bend that dead eye down and render the passage so well you wanted to retire to comb and tissue paper.